Understanding How to Develop a WordPress Theme Based on Bootstrap

Today, almost everyone realizes the growing significance of creating responsive solutions. In fact, having a responsive web design has become an undeniable part of the design and development process, which can be attributed to the increasing mobile usage over laptops/desktops

When creating a responsive design, you need to focus on three key aspects such as a flexible grid-based layout, fluid images and media queries. To work on all these aspects, you’ll be required to write extensive code, however not all the users have a flair for coding. Thankfully, there are several great responsive frameworks available online that makes the process of building a responsive website straightforward and easy.

If you want to develop a responsive WordPress theme, then choosing the Twitter’s Bootstrap framework will prove a viable alternative for you. This framework is easy to learn and comes with good documentation which includes several examples to help developer understand the process of developing a responsive website.

So, do you wish to create a responsive WordPress theme using the Bootstrap framework, but don’t know where to begin. Well, then reading this post further will make you understand the right process that needs to be followed for developing a Bootstrap-powered WordPress theme.

1. Get Started by Downloading Bootstrap

As you may know, every WordPress website requires at least two files called as “style.css” and “index.css” files. But in the case, when you’re creating a website with Bootstrap, you need access to many other files. But, before that it is very important for you to powered theme, you’ll need some more files. To do so, you’ll first need to download Bootstrap from the Github’s official page.

2. Get Your Theme Folder Ready

So, now that you’ve completed the download process, simply open up the Bootstrap zip folder you’ve just downloaded. A window will appear containing items such as the one shown below:
Fig. Bootstrap folder structure.

In the above screen shot, you can see that the Bootstrap folder comprises of 4 folders, namely: images, languages, script and style. What you need to do is, to copy three folders into your WordPress theme folder such as: style, script and images. And then, create the following listed files:

functions.php

index.php

and style.css.

3. It’s Time to Setup The WordPress Theme Based on Bootstrap

The next thing, you’ll have to do is to create a Bootstrap-powered WordPress theme and add the below given code snippet to the top of the style.css file of that theme:

The code in the above block lets WordPress know that the name of your Bootstrap-based theme will be “My Bootstrap theme”. Besides this, it specifies that the version of the new theme is 1.0, and the theme’s author is D2H. Lastly, the line of code “@import url(“style/bootstrap.min.css)” plays a vital part in linking all the bootstrap files from the main WordPress style.css file.

4. Working With the Functions File

So far, you’ve come to know about the process of adding important bootstrap files within your theme’s main CSS file. But, in order to make a WordPress theme functional, you’ll first have to include PHP functions into it. So, your next step is to add the essential PHP functions in your theme functions.php file. This will help in adding scripts, as well as, styles to be added in all the pages of your WordPress theme.

What’s more? You need to add 2 functions to the functions.php file: the first function will make you able to add Bootstrap stylesheet, while the second one will be responsible for adding JavaScript.

Note: For loading JavaScript in the functions file a method, called as wp_enqueue_script() function is used.

The above code will help you create the function enqueue_my_scripts(), which is required for enqueueing jQuery library, and a Bootstrap-based JavaScript file named “jquery” within the WordPress theme. Next, the add_action WordPress hook substitutes the wp_enqueue_scripts() function with the custom enqueue_my_scripts() function. So, use of wp_enqueue_scripts() function in the theme will result in the execution of enqueue_my_scripts() function.

This code snippet works just like the enqueue_my_scripts() function, the only difference is that it will contain stylesheets (i.e. styles) rather than JavaScript (i.e. scripts). Let us now, combine both of the above functions in PHP tags to generate the final piece of code:

After this step, your Bootstrap-based WordPress theme will be ready to use. If needed, you can apply different styles to your newly created theme based on your specific needs.

Summing Up!

In case, you’ve been planning to create a responsive WordPress theme and would like to add some great effects and styles to it, then using the Bootstrap framework can help you achieve your objective. Though this post, we’ve tried covering the basic process that needs to be followed for creating a responsive WP theme based on the Twitter Bootstrap framework.

Article written by Samuel Dawson. Samuel Dawson is a experienced developer in the area of Front End Development technologies. Samuel has done a lot of research on various aspects of web design and sharing here the great bootstrap technology in WordPress themes. He is currently working in Designs2HTML a PSD to WordPress service company.

About Sanwebe

Welcome to sanwebe.com, a blog 100% inspired by our ever changing web development world, it's a small effort to provide useful related resources, tips and tutorials to web developers and newbies. Blog was launched back in 2011, and recently been moved from saaraan to sanwebe.com, blog needs some catching up to do, but your valuable feedbacks will always help.